As a lifelong bookworm, I bloody love a good book about books—and Lucy Mangan’s Bookish is a particularly delightful addition to the ever-growing collection that my boyfriend keeps threatening to break up with me over. A sequel to the brilliant Bookworm, which I read shortly after moving to Australia, I felt an immediate kinship with Lucy and her unending devotion to books, bookshops, and the ever-expanding TBR pile (though, I should add, she also has a whopping 10,000-volume library, housed on custom-made, green-painted shelves in a stand-alone room at the bottom of her garden—a dream I deeply aspire to, though I suspect my boyfriend may need rather more persuasion).
Picking up where Bookworm left off, Bookish traces Mangan’s life through the books that have shaped her—from the classics she discovered at school and university, to the children’s and YA fiction she fell in love with while working at Waterstones, to the books that carried her through her rather brief detour into the world of solicitors. It’s funny, warm and wonderfully unapologetic in its belief that there simply is no such thing as too many books.
An ode to all things bookish (including acquiring books at a much faster rate than one could ever reasonably read them—a habit I know all too well), I utterly flew through it, and you will too. I finished with an even bigger TBR pile than strictly doable—I think Valley of the Dolls might be the first of her many, many recommendations I’ll pick up—and I can guarantee you’ll come away with a rather more ambitious reading list than you started with.
I try to write as much as I can without a paywall, but it does take time. If you’re enjoying this post, why not treat me to a nice glass of prosecco?
And now, onto Lucy’s Desert Island Books. From the classic she considers the most exquisitely written in children’s literature, to her favourite Jane Austen, read on to discover which eight books she’d take with her to the sandy shores of a desert island…
Private – Keep Out by Gwen Grant
This book, about a girl growing up in postwar Nottinghamshire with a blend of stubbornness, fatalism and misanthropy guaranteed to warm the heart of any child, has kept me laughing since I first read it thirty years ago. A desert island must.
The Wolf Hall Trilogy by Hilary Mantel
Partly because I have not yet read The Mirror and the Light I’m going to cheat and include Hilary Mantel’s trilogy as one book, though in all honesty Wolf Hall alone could probably keep me going from first beaching to sandy grave. What an insane, immersive, muscular yet filigree work this book, these books are. What an achievement. You could re-read them just about forever and they would still be yielding new things to love and to admire. I am as much awed as I am entertained and I love a writer who provides both.
Anything at all by Dorothy Whipple
Because she is a wonderful, satisfying storyteller, with a perfect mastery of psychology and detail. If I had to choose one, probably They Were Sisters, the story of three siblings who marry very different men and the effect this has on their lives. It is, among other things, a brilliant evocation of domestic violence, and would comfort me in moments of loneliness by reminding me that, in essence, hell is other people.
Emma by Jane Austen
Any Austen would do, but this is my favourite and I am long overdue a re-read. And a voyage of self-discovery like Emma’s is just what you need to read about when stranded on a desert island.
Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood
You could plumb this book’s depths—of content, of form—forever, and I long to. It was the first adult book I ever read that I could feel rearranging my mental furniture as it went along, expanding my notion of what a novel—and a novelist—could do.
Tom’s Midnight Garden by Philippa Pearce
The most brilliantly-conceived, perfectly paced, exquisitely-written book in children’s literature. I just don’t think I could be without it.
The Children of the New Forest by Frederick Marryat
Seventeenth-century survivalism… Even if forest skills won’t be fully transferable to my sand-based tropical environment, the children’s can-do mindset and steep learning curve when they have to fend for themselves during the Civil War would surely be a help. And I just love this intricately-detailed, fully-realised story. Or I’ll take the Little House on the Prairie series instead, if I’m allowed them all.
The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster
For the endless wordplay and the joyful cleverness. The perfect companion, wherever you are.
Now, if you’d like to lose yourself in the brilliant Bookish, paid subscribers can enjoy a sneak peek below.
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